Additional background: this all seems very strange to me, because I used to have ghc6 installed correctly--I use XMonad as my main window manager most of the time. I tried to install haskell-platform (through apt), which failed and told me that there was something wrong with ghc6, and so I reinstalled ghc6 and began to get the above error message.

(Originally posted here to SuperUser, until I remembered today that this SE site existed.)